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Hunger and the gender gap

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Yan Chen Open the ORCID record for Yan Chen [Opens in a new window] ,
Ming Jiang  and
Erin L. Krupka
Yan Chen*
Affiliation:
School of Information, University of Michigan, 105 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2112, USA Department of Economics, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Ming Jiang*
Affiliation:
Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 1954 Huashan Road, Shanghai 200434, China
Erin L. Krupka*
Affiliation:
School of Information, University of Michigan, 105 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2112, USA
*
yanchen@umich.edu
mjiang@sjtu.edu.cn
ekrupka@umich.edu
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Abstract

Temporary changes in biological state, such as hunger, can impact decision making differently for men and women. Food scarcity is correlated with a host of negative economic outcomes. Two explanations for this correlation are that hunger affects economic preferences directly or that hunger creates a mindset that focuses on scarcity management to the detriment of other decisions. To test these predictions, we conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in a health screening clinic in Shanghai, recruiting participants who finish their annual physical exam either before or after they have eaten breakfast. We compare the hungry and sated groups on their risk, time and generosity preferences as well as their cognitive performance. Our results show that men and women respond to hunger in opposite directions, thus hunger reduces the gender gap in decision quality, risk aversion and cognitive performance, but creates one in generosity. Finally, we examine several biomarkers and find that higher blood lipid levels are correlated with greater choice inconsistency, risk aversion and generosity. We contribute to emerging insights on the biological foundations for economic preferences and outcomes.

Keywords

HungerScarcityGenderRisk preferenceAltruism

JEL classification

D30: General C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D81: Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 885 - 917
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-018-9589-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We would like to thank Colin Camerer, Soo Hong Chew, Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle, Georg Weizsäcker, Maytal Shabat-Simon, and participants at Michigan (Ross), the Jerusalem Conference on the Typologies of Bounded Rationality (2015), the International ESA meetings (Sydney, Australia, 2015) for helpful comments, Jim Andreoni, Peter Kuhn and Charles Sprenger for sharing their data and code with us, as well as Carrie Wenjing Xu, Linfeng Li and Kurtis Drodge for excellent research assistance. We thank two anonymous referees and the Editor, Lata Gangadharan, for their thoughtful and constructive comments which significantly improved the paper. The financial support from the National Science Foundation through Grant No. BCS-1111019 to Chen is gratefully acknowledged. The research has been approved by the University of Michigan IRB.

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